Eucharistic Discernment

"The Eucharist is a celebration of plenitude; it is a recognition of God's provision. It is a challenge to all politics of scarcity. Here at this table, the truth about God's world is told: there is enough. We need not hoard out of fear that there will be too little. We need not fight to get what others have. There is enough. God will provide. God will redeem."--Scott Bader-Saye

When we ask in the Lord's Prayer for "our daily bread," we are asking for more than physical sustenance, for our subsistence is found in a constant renewal of revelation. This revelation is found in both word and table. The Table of the Lord, the Lord's Supper, should be far more central to Protestant Free Church worship than it most often is. God freely offers to reveal himself, and the heart of this revelation is in the Word of God, who is Christ, offered in preaching (as well as all aspects of scripture) and in the Lord's Supper. The Supper is one place that Christians can learn greater discernment of the presence of Christ in his people, and this extends out by implication to the project of a Christian college.

P. T. Forsyth has quipped, "Memorials are meant for heroes who have perished," but this is a bit mean perhaps. A memorial is also a biblical remembrance. The Greek word for remembrance, anamnesis, can be translated "recall by making present." To "remember something" in this way is not to treat it as something that no longer has any relevance to our lives. When the Jews remember the Passover; when Christians remember the Lord's Supper, we are not saying, "Oh well, that was then; this is now." No, when we recall the deeds of God, we are making them present. Or better said, the Spirit is making them present in our discernment. The act of remembrance is a prayer of sorts that God might re-member us. We are no longer spectators outside of a performance. We are worshippers; we are participants in some sense in the drama of God's salvation.

The great Jewish Rabbi Gamaliel said, "In every generation a man must so regard himself as if he came forth himself from Egypt. [. . .] And you shall tell your son on that day saying, "It is because of that which the Lord did for me when I came forth from Egypt." As Scripture exhorts us, "For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes." Christ's sacrifice upon the cross, "once for all time" as the Book of Hebrews tells us, is ever present in us his people. This participation mediates to us profound truths, especially the spiritual unity of Christ in his people, and this is deeply important to Christian pedagogy. As a professor, for example, I must learn to discern the Lord's presence in other Christians in the classroom, as well as in any truth or truth-telling that takes place.

The Baptist preacher C.H. Spurgeon reminds us, as well: real presence means spiritual nourishment, the experience of being filled. I would contend that regular partaking of communion prepares us all for academic and intellectual nourishment--present in the gathered community of Christian learning, as well as in the content of that learning. Am I saying that the regular taking of communion will prepare the student for intellectual discernment? Yes, if rightly received and discerned: "Man is what he eats" (Alexsander Schmemann).

Now, of course, we can and often do resist this. I am not professing a kind of pedagogical or ethical ex opere operato. It is important to remember that grace is everywhere but that it is not available under all conditions, and the nourishment of Christ's presence in the Eucharist opens us up to the gifts of discernment that we need in order to recognize the voice of God in other aspects of our daily living. Eucharist means "thanksgiving," and we need to recall that learning should be possessed by gratitude. Teaching and presence go together, as the gifts and creatures of Supper and Water remind us:

The Eucharist is the site at which the community of the baptized and the work of the Holy Spirit are joined to effect the transformation of persons into an image of the divine fellowship of the Triune God. The Eucharist produces a people who live out of the giftedness of their creatureliness, who make actual the love and generosity, fellowship and freedom that characterize the life of God (1 Corinthians 11). Baptism initiates us into and the Eucharist sustains us in the life we were created for; participation in the ceaseless flow of caritas between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

This passage by Debra Dean Murphy teaches that the Eucharist is at the heart of the Trinity's engraced world--the words of institution call us to remember that all matter is finally God-dependent. Just as there should be an open table in learning, so should the partaking be open. This, then, is at the heart of interpersonal and interrelational learning. As the Lord's Supper offers a different polis from our world's, so should the politics of the Christian classroom be a different politics. Communion is a sign of community. The love affair of the Trinity imparts to us the grace we need to love each other in the academic life.